Packard Bell Dot S review

1 / 5

It’s easy to regard netbooks as being more or less interchangeable, given that their specification is limited by their very definition. However, with the increasing power of newer Atom processors and a refinement of designs to produce lighter, hardier and sleeker machines, the current generation of netbooks represents a significant improvement over its predecessors.

The Packard Bell Dot S isn’t much to look at, but at just under £230, no-one’s expecting an outstanding beauty. It’s available in a range of colour schemes, too. The cheerful patterned white model we reviewed is attractive enough and is certainly a departure from the ubiquitous grey, black and silver colour schemes of most laptops. If it isn’t to your taste then other options are available, including black and purple. The Dot S is compact and well made, but its plastic chassis doesn’t feel particular sturdy. We suppose this the price of having a light weight.

Because it’s so tiny, the Dot S’s layout is a little cramped, but we were impressed by its full-sized keys, which make touch-typing considerably easier than it would otherwise be. The flat keys feel a little wobbly and don’t give the best feedback when you’re typing, but they’re up to the job. There’s no numeric keypad, the spacebar is small and some keys have been crammed together, but it all works well overall, even though we did find ourselves mis-keying from time to time when typing quickly.

The function keys at the top of the keyboard control media and other features by default, so you’ll have to use the (Fn) modifier to use them as Function keys. It’s an unusual choice, but a sensible one. You’re much more likely to adjust your volume than press the F12 button in your favourite application. The touchpad is tiny, but responsive. It’s centrally located on the wrist rest, though, so we didn’t find ourselves brushing it by accident.

The 10.1in display has a resolution of 1,024×600, which is standard for a netbook. Only a few have larger screens or higher resolutions. Obviously, everything feels a little cramped if you’re used to a 1,920×1,080 monitor, but it’s big enough to work on word processor documents comfortably, although we spent longer than we’d like scrolling around large spreadsheets. The screen has a semi-gloss finish that makes it appear bright without being too reflective. Colours are generally accurate, although some dark tones tend to blend in to one another indistinguishably.

The Intel Atom N2600 is massively underpowered as far as our benchmark tests are concerned, achieving an overall score of just 11, but it’s actually a decent little processor if all you want to do is browse the web, create documents and watch videos. The Dot S had no trouble playing our 1080p MPEG4 video test files smoothly and has both VGA and HDMI outputs, making it a decent candidate as a portable mini media centre. It only has 1GB of memory, though, which means things can get a bit sluggish if you’re working on large image files, for example. This is probably worth upgrading at some point, particularly as Packard Bell generously includes a copy of Adobe’s excellent Photoshop Elements 9 for free.

Beyond that, the netbook has the usual 320GB hard disk, part of which is occupied by a restore partition, which leaves you with 284GB of space. That’s plenty for files and documents, even taking into account the size of the operating system, which occupies around 40GB. The Dot S comes with Windows 7 Starter. It’s 32-bit, so it can’t make use of more than 3GB RAM and doesn’t allow you to change your wallpaper or visual styles, but its core functionality isn’t otherwise restricted.

Rounding out the specification, the laptop has three USB ports, the usual headphone, MIC and Gigabit Ethernet ports, and 802.11n Wi-Fi. Its battery lasted just under nine hours in our tests, which is excellent. Even so, if you’re after a budget netbook then the Toshiba NB510-11E is better made and a bit more stylish, if almost identical to all other purposes.